Modding Help

posted on December 9th, 2009, 3:53 pm

I have 2 questions that i could use so help with.

1. How many polys are appropriate for a model. (also milkshape only list triangles in the statistics is that the same thing)
2. How are engine glows added?

posted on December 9th, 2009, 4:16 pm

Pollies in FO shouldn't be a problem, because it is made for higher quality machines, and better graphics.

for engine glows, sence you are making a ship, you need to add emitter hardpoints.  Do you know how to add hard points?  if so all you need is emitter hardpoints, coming from a lights root, named using names from the fleetops.spr  you can find all the lables that are used in game already in there, and can re use them as well.

I suggest you pm blade.  he can explain it better, and has sucsessfully done it for me.

posted on December 9th, 2009, 4:19 pm

For the first question I can only answer based on what other have said... I think that if you want a really visible unit it should be below 3000 ... probably between 2-3 thousand. Does that sound right, or am I off my rocker?

posted on December 9th, 2009, 4:36 pm

well ive got about 2500 polies now so i think im ok. ill pm blade thanks

posted on December 9th, 2009, 10:54 pm

2500 polys(triangles) is a nice number. From the lil bit I have goobered around with MS3D and FO is that mesh groups and textures matter more it seems than number of polys for performance. In my experience at least. If u wanted to be very perfomance conscous you could put in some LOD nodes and then attach textures to those but I am not experienced with LODs at all. I personally dont mess with them. And I havent made anything to date worthy of releasing either. That is except for my reworked COWP hehe....god the texture looks bad though. 

posted on December 9th, 2009, 11:46 pm

i aim for 1200 poly as i like to make meshes for low spec users aswell (yes they still exist) but yh a triangle is a poly

posted on December 10th, 2009, 12:02 am

1. How many polys are appropriate for a model. (also milkshape only list triangles in the statistics is that the same thing)
2. How are engine glows added?

1] For low end machines... 800-1400 pollies (very low), the standard is between 2500 and 4000. Though a lot of models I like (I am a high-poly lover) are 6000 or higher. To me I love high poly objects.
2] Engine glows are hardpoints or nodes placed under the lights parent node... you simply use the names of the warpglows to accomidate with the color of the engines.

Engine glows examples:
warpglowspriteblue6A
warpglowspritered9
warpglowspritegold6
warpglowspriteblue9

You can find these in the fleetops.spr file. usually for the game to accept them they must be properly parented and the hardpoint/node name must start with the letter "s" followed by an underscore. there can be no spaces in the node names, for multiple warpglows of the same size and color you should have the sprite name followed by an underscore and then a number. Hardpoint/node names are not case sensitive but like everything in armada it is spelling sensitive. If the node is misspelled or not properly parented then it may cause the game to crash.